Poem Where I Refuse to Talk about —

Xandria Phillips

I’m eight wearing a frumpy
bunched-up dress with stockings
I put runs in that same morning
while rushing to pull them up
after peeing and flattening
my midweek temple frizz
the cool girls in their jeans
and angel|devil Ts are having
a laugh at my existence
they are white and built like
miniature bird-chested women
on asphalt my low heels
clacking like principal feet
another unspoken more bent
I want the sweat of boyhood
its ease and virtue on my neck
I want my cunning known
because I am the softest
I can ever be in this moment
when I don’t rough my mutt
hands on their throats
for making terrible light of
the second-hand / the sub
-human / the audacity of it
my survival / lower than lint
instead I talk to grass
but a sapling myself
I am made everyday like a bed
like a person makes another
and nothing ever asks to be made

Xandria Phillips is the author of Hull (Nightboat Books, 2019) and Reasons For Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. They are the poetry editor at Honeysuckle Press and a Winter Tangerine workshop adviser. Their poetry is published or forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, The Journal, and elsewhere. Xandria is currently based in Chicago, Illinois.